Sound Effects

“The Situation” and a season of Ennio Morricone.

The new Philip Haas film, “The Situation,” is not the first movie to consider the United States’ presence in Iraq. We already have “Turtles Can Fly,” a sharp evocation of life in the Kurdish territories, set in 2004. Though grim, it was brightened by a child’s-eye view, and it closed with the good news—as it seemed to the Kurds—that the Americans were coming. Now, three years on, and three thousand American deaths later, good news sounds like a bad joke, or a halfremembered chimera. Such is the present-day backdrop against which “The Situation” is staged.

What it investigates is the policy—pursued by governments and clung to by private souls—of hoping against hope. In Baghdad, an intelligence officer named Dan Murphy (Damian Lewis) continues to work on the principle that hearts and minds may yet be won, swayed, or, at the very least, bought. He arranges the contract for a water-treatment plant; he talks knowledgeably of hospitals that require incubators for babies, whereas his colleague, Wesley (Shaun Evans), scoffing at such idealism, prefers to speak of “democracy by force.” Mind you, Wesley wears a black bow tie with a blue shirt in hundred-degree heat, so he was clearly deranged to begin with. Meanwhile, outside the Green Zone (the phrase is starting to acquire the patina of a Thomas Pynchon setting), Anna Molyneux (Connie Nielsen), an American journalist and occasional bedfellow of Dan, picks her way gingerly through a story: Two Iraqi teen-agers fell afoul of an American checkpoint and got tossed into a river. Only one of them could swim.

We see this incident at the start of the film, and duly expect Anna to expose it; but her efforts are fitful, and our attention, like hers, is pulled elsewhere. You could argue that Haas and his screenwriter, Wendell Steavenson, have planned this deliberately, so as to deepen the impression of a country snarled up in loose ends—how can you hope to impose democratic discipline, after all, when a single dumb crime goes unsolved? If so, they are running a double risk. First, we are left with the simple suspicion that Anna isn’t much of a reporter. There is a long, and by now threadbare, tradition of cinematic incursions into foreign lands being led by white Western journalists. Think of “Under Fire,” “Salvador,” or Volker Schlöndorff’s magnificent “Circle of Deceit.” In those instances, however, the hero seems as bedevilled as his destination, whereas Anna is so meek and fretful that, as a character, she is soon outgunned by her surroundings. I sometimes wonder if Connie Nielsen has quite recovered from “Gladiator.” Even now, as she makes love in a hotel room, there is something stunned in her demeanor, as if Joaquin Phoenix were still nuzzling her off camera.

Second, if Haas feels no need to spin a tight yarn, that may be because he is too busy making a point. We hear it in the numbness of the dialogue, which could have been adapted from Ionesco. Listen to this exchange: “I’m sorry, it’s the situation.” “Everything is the situation.” Or this: “Let’s not talk about this for one night.” “There’s nothing else to talk about.” Really? There is always triviality whistling around, even in battle (think of “Three Kings,” David O. Russell’s manic take on the first Gulf War, with its meshing of grand purpose and cheap plunder), and Haas’s film tends to pick up speed only when minor characters, bearing furtive agendas, sidle into the frame. Take Zaid (Mido Hamada), an Iraqi photographer whose desire to work with Anna is less professional than shyly affectionate—they lie on a bed and hold hands. Then, there is Duraid (Mahmoud El Lozy), a bearish ex-Baathist with a wide, worldly smile. His sole wish is to quit Iraq (a diplomatic post in Australia, he explains, would do nicely), and he has information, useful to the Americans, that might hasten his departure. There is something about his calm conversation with Dan—they cradle glasses of whiskey, in the sunshine—that beautifully dramatizes the slow, corrupted steps by which civilization needs to be inched ahead.

That deceptive tranquillity has long been Haas’s forte, as anybody who saw “The Music of Chance” or “Angels & Insects” will attest. He shot this new movie in Morocco, and the result is convincingly bleached and parched, with piebald cars spraying dust or lining up at gas stations. The combat scenes in “The Situation,” however, do not represent his finest hour, or even his most exciting minute; many years could—and perhaps should—elapse before Iraq finds the director with the energy to do justice to its fissile plight. The camerawork is handheld throughout, yet Haas is not a man of natural jitters, and long after the violence—a climactic American assault on an insurgent stronghold, with Anna trapped foolishly inside—has died down, this awkward and half-digested movie gives off a melancholy reek. One of the last sights is that of Dan, surveying the aftermath of the attack. Under sunlight the color of sand, he finds the incubators he ordered, unused and abandoned. So much for new life.

As far as this year’s Academy Awards ceremony is concerned, only two things are certain. One is that the evening will not be Borat-free. The other is that Ennio Morricone will be given an honorary Oscar. He will thus join one of the choicest subsets in Hollywood, headed by Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant: the Overlooked. These are figures who have been nominated several times (five, in Morricone’s case), who have never won, and to whom the Academy at last, tardily and guiltily, hands a fistful of gold. Borat can expect his forty years from now.

Morricone is a composer. There may be moviegoers, as pale as deep-sea creatures, who have seen every film that he has scored; one list puts the tally at five hundred and twenty-eight. On the other hand, no moviegoer over the age of forty will fail to recognize the waa-wuaaah-waa that signalled Morricone’s presence in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” That was the third of his collaborations with Sergio Leone, a partnership that was to last from “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964) to “Once Upon a Time in America,” twenty years later, and which I recently heard Quentin Tarantino, in a TV interview, hail as the greatest entwining of composer and director in the history of cinema. The spaghetti Western was nothing without its meat sauce.

By way of tribute, February is Morricone month in New York. On the third, there will be a concert of his work at Radio City, with the man himself on the podium—his first such engagement, astonishingly, in the United States. Meanwhile, MOMA will be screening six films, and Film Forum a deafening twenty-six, including some of Morricone’s ventures into Americana, such as “Days of Heaven” and “The Untouchables,” plus two of his projects with Bernardo Bertolucci: “Before the Revolution” and “La Luna.” As for rarities, I like the sound of “A Quiet Place in the Country” (1969), which, according to the program, includes “Nymphomania, Necrophilia, Fetishism, Sadomasochism.” All that and Vanessa Redgrave. Sounds like a job for the horn section.

It’s good to be reminded that Morricone was asked to assist the bizarre and the brutal—he supplied the score for Pasolini’s “Salò,” an unforgiving exercise in disgust—because, like any artist who seems to summon loveliness at will, he will always risk being patronized for his facility. You sit down to watch Giu-seppe Tornatore’s “Malèna” (2000), and your ears know what to expect: a glorious struggle, as Morricone strives to mold harmonic shapes that can go head to head, or quaver to quaver, with Monica Bellucci. He had already transformed Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” into something more than itself—had stirred longing into its sweetness and thereby bound it together. The same recipe had worked, on a majestic scale, with “Once Upon a Time in America,” where the movie’s most plaintive theme was touched off not just by an old man gazing through the window of his boyhood hangout but also by one of his friends, filmed as a kid, scooping cream from a charlotte russe. What ignites Morricone, in other words, is less the nostalgic impulse than those pure, primal experiences which are destined to become the objects of nostalgia—the laying up of treasures upon earth.

To listen to that film is to be surprised by how careful, even sparse, the use of music is. I was under the vague impression that Morricone had been at work throughout, whereas, in fact, he likes to lie in wait. It is that seizing of moments, the shudder of sudden attention, that lifts him to the top stave of movie composers, in all their stealth and pounce. You might not connect Morricone with a work as fiery as Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” (showing at Film Forum on February 9th and 10th), which feels as if it needed no music at all; yet it bursts into a rattle of drums, as French troops, in 1957, head into the Casbah in search of their insurrectionist foes. When young Algerian boys, whipped up by a Muslim call for puritanism, set upon a drunkard and drag him down some steps, we hear three chords of crashing dissonance. Society is now primed to explode. This is Cinema Inferno, and Ennio Morricone, conjuror of the beautiful, is right there in its midst. ♦